*** DROPS FEBRUARY 27, 2020 at OWLS NEST BOOKS ***
The Nightshade Cabal
©2020 The Parliament House Press
“The resulting calamity would have made the nine muses
weep…”
In this debut novel of Steampunk Crime, there’s no cause for
readers to emulate those sad muses. Carolan’s prose offers the easy formality
familiar to readers of Steampunk from Jules Verne to the present. His is a
world familiar in some ways – quasi-Victorian Halifax against the Murdoch
Mysteries’ Toronto
– and unfamiliar in others, namely the mingling of mechanical marvels with magical
practices. From the first scene, in a crowded theatre where a stage magician’s illusory creations threaten to unleash very real mayhem on the
dazzled audience, you can relax into a tale equal parts Vernean fantasia and
Sherlockian deduction.
Our doughty sleuth, Isaac Barrow, specializes in repairing
machinery that has magic built into its design. As one of the few remaining technomancers
in public practice – the rest having been driven underground by a distrustful city
– he is sometimes quietly called upon to assist the police in their odder
inquiries. Often these are connected to the secretive Nightshade
Cabal, magic-users nominally kept in check by the equally publicity-shy Triune
Congress.
But there are places even the Triune’s magisters avoid...
Into these dark byways Isaac Barrow must tread, hunting for
two missing teens: an unremarkable neighbourhood boy, and a girl whose own
family admits she was mixed up with the Cabal once before. Threatened by both
the Cabal and the Triune, and aided by unlikely allies – notably including a
gruff little Fae with a Feegle-sized chip on his tiny shoulder – Barrow
penetrates both the mansions of the powerful and the foetid underbelly of Halifax’s wharves.
The Nightshade Cabal is that rare crossover likely to
satisfy equally readers of crime and of Steampunk. Part homage to the greats in
both genres, it’s also entirely it’s own creation. I anticipate further good
reads from Chris Patrick Carolan.
